Cluster Map

March 31, 2006

Last week I posted on Basic Trust, Tipping Points, & Walls and discussed the growing perception that our war with Islamism is not just limited to the radical fringe of Islam but that Islam itself, embodied in Sharia law, is incompatible with Western freedom and modernism; the case of Abdul Rahman followed a series of increasingly clear points of demarcation:

A series of events have been created and/or high-jacked by the worst in Islam, and the question now is whether or not this is the majority of Islam. Starting with the Iraqi insurgency that seemed to relish inhuman and inhumane behavior, many began to wonder if Iraq, and indeed if the entire Muslim world, was beyond Modernity. The Paris car-burning, the cartoon riots, the torture murder of a French Jew, Ilan Halimi, by Islamic barbarians, the destruction of the Golden Mosque; all these events have pushed more and more Americans to a tipping point.

Today's post set seems like a good place to revisit the issue of post-tipping point politics. Liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, whose recent works include epistles like "Bushies in a State of Denial" and "Hillary Clinton: Our Favourite Victim" appears to have had a bit of a wake-up call over the threat to execute Christian convert (and hence murtadd charged with irtidad) Abdul Rahman.

When liberals begin to notice and are forced by reality to adjust their perceptions, we know we are getting close to a major tipping point. I would like to take this an exponential leap further.

March 30, 2006

In Part I and Part II of this series, I described how my patient, Gudrun, was able to find a partial resolution of her unconscious conflicts that arose out of her family secrets (especially her mother's family secrets) related to the Holocaust. The discussion in the comments which followed Part II was extremely thought-provoking and enlightening. Many questions were raised, especially about the applicability of this particular woman's dynamics to the current state of the European zeitgeist. If you haven't read the comments, I would suggest doing so now, because many of the points are pertinent and relate to this post.

My patient grew up in Germany, post-war, in an environment where the entire population conspired to bury all memory of their complicity, many by an active role but most by their passivity, in the Holocaust. Her mother's childhood best friend was the Jewish girl who lived next door; one day she and her family simply disappeared, never to be seen or mentioned again. Gudrun's mother kept this secret to herself for almost 40 years. Of interest, the mother never really "knew" explicitly that it was a secret; she had merely never thought to mention it to her daughter until Gudrun directly confronted her on a visit when Gudrun was in her late 20's.

The analogue, in an individual, of Europe's communal denial is repression, and therein lies the tale (if I may borrow from the Bard.)

March 29, 2006

Yesterday, I began to tell the story of Gudrun, who was in her mid-20's when she sought treatment for her chronic difficulty in getting along with people. She was a gifted, attractive German woman who often wore a Jewish star around her neck, had lived in Israel for a year when she was 18, and spent a fair amount of time contemplating a conversion to Judaism. She discovered during her therapy that she had been named after her mother's childhood best friend, a Jewish girl named Giselle, who had disappeared into the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in the late 1930's, never to be seen or spoken of again.

[In my post yesterday, I failed to point out that Gudrun's naming by her mother had been in keeping with the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) tradition of using the first initial to denote a connection to a lost loved one.]

Despite what Gudrun was able to learn about herself, self knowledge which went a long way toward helping her understand the ways in which she unconsciously provoked others to attack her, she was never able to find and maintain a suitable long term relationship. This was puzzling since we both thought we understood much of what had interfered with her relationships in the past and she was very frequently courted by men who to all appearances were thoroughly appropriate.

Ultimately, we learned that there was an irreducible conflict that prevented Gudrun from ever finding the long term relationship she craved.

March 28, 2006

Early in my career, a woman, who I shall call Gudrun, came to me for treatment, under duress. She was in an excellent job which seemed well suited to her but had been told by her boss that if she did not obtain Psychiatric treatment she was going to be fired. She recognized that she did not get along well with people; in most of her relationships she ended up feeling and being mistreated. There were a number of striking things about this woman, not least of which her beauty and intelligence. She was German and had come to the United States in her mid-20's in order to obtain her graduate degree, and had decided to stay in New York because she didn't see much of a future for herself in Germany.

My initial impression was that this woman was very appealing, even beyond her obvious charm and intellect. She was engaging, warm, able to become involved in a relatively intensive psychotherapy without any obvious difficulties in the area of emotional intimacy and openness, and I found myself wondering why she had been unable to ever have a long term relationship and why she evoked such powerful anger in her boss and co-workers. As time went on, I noticed there were significant missing parts of her history.

She was born a little more than 10 years after the end of World War II. Her father had been in the German army and after the war had been imprisoned in Stalin's gulag for several years before he was released and made his way home. Her mother was a teenager during the war and had lived through the war in Berlin. Her parents married when her father finally returned home after the war. She had no siblings. It took several months of therapy for both of us to recognize what was missing from her story: She had no idea what her parents had experienced during the war.

March 27, 2006

Immigration reform and the benefits and dangers of immigration, especially from south of the border, has leaped into the spotlight. Bills in Congress designed to criminalize illegal immigrants vie with bills to create a guest worker program and allow illegal immigrants a way to gain a toe hold in the American system. With all that is being written about immigration, the key issues tend to be ignored or dismissed. Ultimately, immigration is About the Children.

After some quibbles about whether we should call undocumented aliens "illegal", Marc Cooper [HT: OSM] suggests that the weekend rallies were in favor of legal immigration rather than in support of illegal immigrant. He then argues, in Immigration Issue Explodes [Updated] that the arguments over immigration have everything to do with bringing our economic necessity into some rational relationship to the current immigration mess:

The only argument we -- as a nation of immigrants-- can make against the current migratory wave is that our grandparents and parents came here legally so why don't Jose and Maria do the same? Well, America of 2006 is not the America that my family came to in 1915 (and when they came they also pushed aside better-paid longer-term residents and citizens). Our work force is vastly older and immensely better educated and skilled than even fifty years ago. The industrial revolution which was roaring ahead a century ago has given way, unfortunately, to a service economy. Barring Mexicans from coming across the border is not going to magically re-open shuttered car and tractor factories. On the contrary, if you could even plausibly tamp down the inflow, you would only increase the out-migration of American business.

Our national economy easily absorbs and desperately needs about a million-and-a-half immigrant workers per year to grow and compete. We let a million of them come in legally. The other half million we make run and dart across the border at cost of great peril.

Schizophrenia is generally considered the most devastating of all psychiatric illnesses. It is a condition in which the sufferer feels like they are "losing their mind" and in some cases, actually experience their own minds as being out of their control. All of us have "crazy" thoughts form time to time, and many, perhaps most people, experience intrusive and unwanted thoughts on occasion. However, for the Schizophrenic who suffers form Paranoia, the intrusive thoughts and "crazy" thoughts can come to predominate their minds. They literally feel as if someone, or some powerful force, is controlling their minds. The terror that this evokes is hard to appreciate.

The worst totalitarian ideologies attempt to impose just this kind of thought control on their subjects. Most people are aware of the case of Abdul Rahman, an Afghani who converted to Christianity many years ago and is now being prosecuted for apostasy, which carries a death sentence under the interpretation of Sharia law prevalent in large swaths of the Muslim world. Michelle Malkin has an excellent summary and includes a link to this Eugene Volokh's post:

The striking thing about the Abdul Rahman prosecution — in which an Afghanistan court is considering whether to execute Rahman because he converted from Islam to Christianity — is how Establishment the prosecution is. The case is before an official Afghani court. The death sentence is, to my knowlege, authorized by official Afghani law. The New York Times reports that the prosecutor, an Afghan government official, "called Mr. Rahman 'a microbe' who 'should be killed.'"

March 26, 2006

I receive a tremendous amount of e-mail through this site, and it is increasing all the time. I have a very limited amount of time in which to read my mail and even less time in which to answer it. I read every e-mail and usual intend to answer most of it; however, reality typically intervenes and often, too often, e-mail gets shunted aside. At this point, all I can say is that I will continue to read every note sent my way, but if I fail to answer in a timely fashion, or at all, please accept my apologies.

This week, the Education Wonks won first place by discussing a very bright young girl who illustrates much of what can go wrong when intelligence and youth are subordinate to a program of indoctrination rather than taught the ability to think critically. They raise a pertinent question, Autum Ashante: Child Prodigy Or Something Else?; keep in mind this child is 7 years old and her poetry is not based on original research. Second place belongs to Rightwing Nuthouse for their poignant posting on A TALE OF TWO FATHERS.

March 23, 2006

Eve Garrard has a very interesting and thought provoking post on normblog (HT: Pajamas Media) called Choosing disability in which she raises some very difficult ethical issues:

The case of the deaf couple who deeply wanted to have a deaf child, and were pleased when it turned out that they did, may set ethical alarm bells ringing in some people's minds. How can it be right to want your child to be disabled? To many, that's just obviously wrong, obviously a dreadful thing to hope for.

She struggles with trying to understand why people have such a powerful reaction to the story and concludes that:

... the view that it's wrong to deliberately hope for, or choose to have, a disabled child does seem (from the inside, so to speak) as if it has something to do with the welfare of this particular child. It's a widespread moral feeling, but it's difficult to justify. Many of the great debates in bioethics are like that: we find that we have strong moral views, but can't always see what (if anything) is sustaining them. The issue of choosing disability shares with the issues of euthanasia and abortion and genetic engineering the capacity to evoke powerful moral responses for which it's sometimes hard to provide adequate reasons. How are we to make sense of this?

I will not directly address the moral and ethical issues here (though it is implicit) because the psychological dimensions are highly enlightening and may have some more general implications.

A concept developed by Erik Erikson. He indicated that children who have secure attachments with their parents have a general sense that the world is predictable and reliable (this is basic trust). This basic trust, according to Erikson, is formed by loving, sensitive, care givers and not from genetic makeup or to a continuously positive environment. (Amplification here and here.)

Along with Basic Trust, a child's mind develops in close contact with their parents' minds and it is a late developmental milestone for a child to recognize that not everyone's mind works just like theirs does. People who develop Narcissistic characters never fully grasp this idea on an emotional rather than intellectual level.

Civilization allows for a wide range of mental arrangements but there are certain fundamentals without which civilization could not exist. I have often quoted Freud's famous aphorism:

"The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."

The requirement that is inherent in this aphorism is a baseline assumption that the stranger you are meeting will not do you harm without warning. Thus, men could shake hands, recognizing that the absence of a weapon meant that if violence was going to ensue, it would be preceded by talk.